Yahoo has introduced a new way for site owners to enhance their Yahoo Search results using SearchMonkey. If you have flash videos, games, presentations, etc. you can have them show up right in Yahoo’s SERPs.
Yahoo shares an example of how Hulu added the following code:
<link rel=”image_src” href=”https://murdok.org/images/32912_145×80_generated__VfWxSNY3rESG1ntOzexNRQ.jpg” />
<link rel=”video_src” href=”http://www.hulu.com/embed/GREW9Qw0P7KjIyjJydQYRw” />
<meta name=”video_height” content=”296″/>
<meta name=”video_width” content=”512″/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Video description: Homer gets upset at a vending machine filled with apples.”/>
<meta name=”video_type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash”/>
…and made their search results look like this:
If a user clicked on the video thumbnail in the above example, they would get an embedded video they could watch directly from the results page:
“We’ll be reviewing sites that want to display rich media content before they can appear in search results to ensure an optimal user experience on the search results page,” a representative for Yahoo tells Murdok. “Users can already see the enhanced result for video on their search results as Yahoo! currently supports a number of popular video players including Hulu, YouTube, and MetaCafe. Documents and games will be supported in the near future, while the code is available for site owners to start adding now.”
I think you can see the potential there. Of course, not all webmasters will be thrilled with the idea of giving users their content right from the SERPs. Most would probably prefer to have the traffic come to their sites, but on the other hand, it might get your business some attention when it would otherwise get overlooked in the SERP. More information about this featue of SearchMonkey can be found here.
